TIED UP IN THE PAST

I'm not sure which is the crueler fate: To live a life of so little agency so as to allow some powerful force to determine one's thoughts and behaviors or to live with such a person who allows these powerful forces to dominate their will and animate their actions.

I strongly suspect it's the latter. 

Dennis "Bucky" Digby, age 6

My son Bucky - we call him Bucky though his real name is Dennis - is thirty-four years old and has been married to his wife Sherry for nearly five years. They have a four year-old daughter, Dania, who in all objectivity, is the single most beautiful thing in the entire universe. Even at this tender age I can see she'll be the image of her dad.

Hopefully.

It's not that her mother is unattractive, quite the contrary, I find Sherry to be rather fetching. It's just that she's one of those people whose character is of such flimsy foundation that she's constantly involving herself in one type of cultish fad after another.

Just in the past several years she's flirted with the paranoid bridge tables of Lyndon LaRouche, the sandaled Theosophicals of Ojai, the double-jointed Dahn yoga nerds of Scotsdale and most recently those clean cut weirdos with the bright yellow name tags from GroundSign Technologies who cordially invite you to their twelve-hour lectures but once you're there, don't let you use the bathroom.

 Imagine going out for sushi and hearing why 9/11 was an inside job or how the great "Ancient Wisdom" was corrupted by Christianity or that murdered meat will mess with your chakras or that "the past has no meaning outside the meaning given to it by the past."

That's Sherry in a nutshell - a passionate, fair-weather enthusiast of all things ridiculous. 

And you know what ... she should live and be well if this stuff makes her happy.

My problem is that her nonsense is not just running her life but it's running  Bucky's and the baby's as well. One month he's hiding the New York Times under a seat cushion to avoid an argument about "the alleged independent press," the next he's sneaking Dania out of the house for an Easter egg hunt so as not to listen to a screed on the commodification of normative religion.  

Sherry's "new bold self" is so sensitive and fragile that just about anything that comes out of Bucky's mouth is likely to set her off.

When she was taking the six-month Leadership course at GroundSign she needed to recruit at least fifteen new enrollees or else they would revoke her designation as a senior Seminar Room Captain and take away her "Guidance Binder". When Bucky refused to sign up for the three day course she told him he was stubborn and "uncoachable" and they've been living under a vapor ever since. 

In the good old days all the crackpots lived in California but unfortunately that's no longer the case. In our lawless, disorderly age the cultural hen house has been raided by heretics and hucksters. With the decline of faith our natural rage after meaning finds its meager satisfaction in the fleeting orthodoxies of street prophets and con men. No longer guided by the venerable public intellectuals of the past we ask YouTube to illuminate on life's puzzles and mysteries.


Ever wonder how to tie the perfect Windsor?